Advance Wars: Dual Strike

The DS finally puts its second screen to good use.

We have by now become at least somewhat familiar with the Advance Wars milieu: highly strategic, chess-like battles played out on overhead maps that would make your Risk-playing father proud. Commanding officers, each with their own unique battlefield abilities (repair all units, lower cost of manufacturing units, highly damaging area-of-effect attacks, etc.), take to the grid-like warzones and try to outmaneuver the enemy. In concept it sounds like any other strategic RPG, whether you're playing Front Mission or Romance of the Three Kingdoms or Final Fantasy Tactics. In practice, it's much accessible than any of those, thanks to the fast pace of combat (you can turn all animations off if you just want to go straight to the results of a battle), and the clean, anime-style hand drawn artwork.

It's business as usual for the allied forces versus the Black Hole Army, but Advance Wars: Dual Strike is a much greater step forward in the series than its predecessor, Advance Wars: Black Hole Rising. The key is the "Dual Strike" (DS - get it?) element this third chapter in the series brings. No longer confined to a single screen, battles can now (but not always) take place on the ground and in the air at the same time. While you don't control what actions take place on the second screen specifically, you do assign what troops are sent there. This gives battles a more significant sense of progression, since you're actually fighting on multiple fronts. What commanders you choose to lead the assault (multi-screen battles involve multiple COs) greatly affects your strategy versus the enemy. Of course, the new commanding officers and units (like the awesome new new Neotank -- think giant, walking asskicking tank) enhance the offensive and defensive considerations.

While the extensive single-player options will keep armchair COs busy for ages, the game gets a fresh set of legs in the expanded palette of multiplayer modes. The realtime Combat mode is an interesting diversion, but ultimately lacks the depth that draws one to the series in the first place. Having one unit at a time to combat the swarming troops of the enemy becomes irritating after a while too. Gamers looking for rich, multiplayer combat are better served in the Versus modes, where up to eight people can match wits in the fog of war, with either a single game card, or multiple copies of the game. Entrants into the multiplayer arena should be warned that these battles can now take hours, especially with the new multi-front warfare mixed in. Hardcore fans will undoubtedly enjoy this sort of thing (a couple battles could take an entire weekend afternoon), but if you're looking for quicker thrills, this probably isn't the best game for it. Another thing that's worth consideration is the unbalanced CO abilities. While some skills (used singly, or in "Tag" formation) are marginally helpful, others are way too beneficial to the user, making for artificially difficult challenges.

The dual screens allow Intelligent Systems to provide more colorful, flashy presentation on its front end, with stylish overlays and effects that wouldn't look out of place on a televised broadcast of a sporting event. Units look mostly the same as their Game Boy Advance counterparts, comprised of tiny sprits on a tiny map. Control is another thing enhanced by the dual screens, as moving your units is facilitated by the stylus (drag your units' positions around with a couple taps of the stylus) in case the D-pad mechanic isn't fast enough for you. But one thing the twin screens can't save is the horrendous dialogue imparted by the majority of the teenage commanding officers who argue the merits of their impending battles as if they were discussing what movie to see at the mall. Sample dialogue, courtesy of Jake, the teen commander who spouts out such tripe as "we're about to serve Black Hole a bowl of smackdown soup!" If he's not laying the smack down, he's talking about what mixed tapes he's bringing to the next battle. It's enough to make you want to strangle Nintendo's usually reliable localization team. Of course, this is probably just an interpretation of the Japanese equivalent's original script, but it's still grating for anyone over the age of 14.

That said, Advance Wars: Dual Strike is still a goldmine of tactical riches. The gameplay is fast (once you've dribbled past the Teen Beat dialogue) and the game looks sharp. While there's still some wiggle room for improvement (Intelligent Systems could simplify multiplayer battles for quicker bouts, and either flesh out the combat mode or ditch it), the Advance Wars brand is fast becoming the standard against which other strategy games, handheld or otherwise, should be judged.